André Prah: Ice Horses of Ladoga

In the book “Kaputt”, the Italian war correspondent and surrealist writer Curzio Malaparte describes the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union.

During the severe winter, in December 1941 he heads for the front, where he describes a strange sight. On the shore of Lake Ladoga in Karelia, Finnish troops had encircled a Soviet artillery regiment with its horses. The Finns set the forest on fire. 

Terrified, the Soviet artillery horses—nearly 1,000 of them—threw themselves into the sea of flames and broke through the siege of fire and machine guns, down into Lake Ladoga. Between the drop-off and the wall of fire, the horses clung to one another and stretched their heads above the water. Those closest to the shore were attacked by the fire at their backs; they reared up and tried to force a way through with teeth and hooves.

In the midst of all the tumult they are paralyzed by the cold. During the night the north wind arrives, sweeping down from the sea at Murmansk like howling spirits, and the ground suddenly lies dead. Close to a thousand horses, frozen fast, become an ice monument to the horrors of war.

André Prah has interpreted Malaparte’s account and recreated the ice horses—in pieces of wood, roots, trunks, and branches.